"What makes this situation unique is the shift in development duties from High Voltage Software to the Japanese studio HexaDrive - a small company formed by a number of ex-Capcom R&D employees. Previously responsible for the HD releases of Rez and Okami, HexaDrive was challenged with fixing a codebase which had passed through multiple teams across multiple platforms in two different countries. However, the improvement is dramatic thanks to the development of an entirely new renderer designed to take full advantage of the PlayStation 3 which gives the Kojima fanbase the respect it deserves - up to a point. Owing to budgetary issues, only Zone of the Enders: The Second Runner received this treatment and even then it's only the PS3 version that benefits - the Xbox 360 game was not updated, and the original ZOE remains untouched on both platforms."

"The original Zone of the Enders remains unpatched on both consoles, but generally it is much more playable than its accompanying ZOE2 release. Even on PS3, the game manages to hit 60fps fairly regularly only suffering dips in the presence of heavy alpha effects. While the visuals aren't completely faithful to the original game, it's still reasonably playable without the patch on both platforms."